The stigma of online dating has been slowly lifting, due in large part to the rise of social networking.

Though the majority of marriages still meet through more traditional means, nearly everyone on the Web has met someone or made a friend online.

Even before the Web itself was created, bulletin board services and newsgroups played host to a variety of Internet dating activities, many of them unintended.

This doesn’t mean that online dating has lost all of its stigma.

In some circles meeting a boyfriend/girlfriend or even a spouse online is viewed as a sign of desperation. As more and more people meet their significant others online, the stigma against it is deteriorating.

The matrimonial services from that century were just the beginning of the pairing of technology and dating.

Newspapers would also provide personal ads, which often relied on the telephone to send/receive messages, VHS brought us video dating and, more recently, the Internet brought us online dating.

With those sites, the idea of online “social networking” was born and online dating was a byproduct of that.

People could meet potential boyfriends or girlfriends on the Web without going to a site dedicated to the cause.This legitimacy caused the major Internet players, including both Yahoo! During the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, there were several other high-profile dating site acquisitions However, as with most budding Web businesses, the dot com crash in 2001/2002 brought much of the frenzy to an end and changed the online world.However, for dating sites, the change came more from the launch of Friendster and Myspace in 2002.Of course, the use of the Web to find romantic partners should surprise no one.Perhaps more than any other revolution in communication, the use of the Web for dating makes sense.Currently the market has been segmented out to an ever larger number of sites focused on an ever-smaller niche audiences.